ANOTHER VOICE
Introducing Kangaroo's Paw, a wonderful new disease from Australia
AUBERON WAUGH
IAdelaide n seven days spent touring the wine areas of Australia's most beautiful and civilised state, I have seen (and eaten) a kangaroo, seen (and cuddled) a koala, seen a wombat, some emus and shaken my fist at a dingo, but I have not actually seen an aboriginal Australian. They tell me that if I ventured out of the Hilton Hotel into the neighbouring Victoria Park I would see them disporting themselves on the benches where they while away the hours with a bottle or two of port. This seems to be a fairly intelligent way of facing life's prob- lems. South Australians make some excel- lent tawny ports, mostly from the Shiraz (syrah) grape, which stand aging in the cask very well, although I was less impress- ed by the few bottle-aged 'vintage ports' I tried.
I do not think that I will intrude upon these people's well-earned leisure, although the Australians are much exer- cised by what they insist on calling the Aboriginal Problem. An attractive repor- ter on the Adelaide Morning Advertiser told me that her life's ambition was to encourage aboriginal women to resume their traditional method of giving birth in the squatting position, out of doors and to encourage the Australian medical profession to recognise it as a valid method of child-bearing.
This seems to me to represent a perfectly acceptable use for the aboriginal Austra- lian population — as a practical model for the gynaecological theories of idealistic female journalists. It is certainly much kinder than pilgering them. Perhaps the beginning of my new love affair with Australia can be traced to an extraordinary television programme by John Pilger about a year ago in which he denounced his fellow-countrymen as genocidal racists for their treatment of these obviously amiable people. Nobody in Australia seems to have seen this programme, so perhaps it was not shown here. Or perhaps I dreamed it.
But Australians, as I have discovered, are seriously concerned about the 160,000 or so surviving aboriginals, whose ances- tors roamed the vast plains of this beautiful country more or less unmolested for 40,000 years. The fact that they were unmolested — except by snakes, and by the occasional aggressive kangaroo — probably explains both why they survived and why they do not seem to have evolved, to any notice- able extent, over the past 40,000 years in the way that homo sapiens evolved else- where. In fact, if one judges by their earliest manifestation in cave painting etc, it might seem that their history over this period has been one of gentle decline. Under other circumstances, one would say that the fact of their survival puts the kibosh on any Darwinian theories about the survival of the fittest. Shocking as the last century's Tasmanian massacres un- doubtedly were, one must suppose that similar acts of genocide occurred all over the place in prehistory, or we would never have evolved as we have. By the same token, I do not see how anything as defenceless as the koala could possibly have survived if it had been pitted against a more formidable adversary than the Au- stralian aboriginal.
Nowadays, of course, aboriginals and koalas are similarly revered and cherished. My hostess was unmistakably shocked when, having finished my kangaroo — it tastes like rather gamy beef, scarcely to be distinguished from the foolish new fashion for serving duck as magret de canard — I announced that I would like to eat a koala bear. It was rather like asking Esther Rantzen if I could eat one of her kiddies. One should be careful not to offend the susceptibilities of hosts. When I dined with a former premier of South Australia, he asked me whether we had an equivalent of the aboriginal problem in England, and how we solved it.
The first part of the question was easy enough to answer. In their reverence for ancient and inappropriate social practices, their peculiar dietary preferences, their linguistic inaccessibility, their suspicion of formal education, their clannishness, their weakness for alcohol and their unsuitabil- ity for most forms of employment, the aboriginals are scarcely to be distinguished from our own beloved northern working class. However, the search for a 'solution' to the 'problem' is surely misconceived. There are no solutions to human problems of this sort. Humanity is the problem. Only lunatics — whether extreme socialists or extreme fascists — would look for a final solution.
All we can do, as both the Westminster and the Canberra governments are doing, is to go on throwing money at these people and then leave them to their own devices. As I prepare to leave Adelaide, I read of terrible riots in an aboriginal settlement near Darwin in the Northern Territories. Police and militia have been sent in. It appears to have arisen from some domestic quarrel. But at least Australia is still too far removed from any neighbouring country for aboriginals to disrupt their football matches or murder the foreign supporters.
But in one point at least the Australians are ahead of us, and I bring news of this great innovation, called Repetitive Strain Injury (or RSI) with some pride. Briefly, RSI is the ache we all feel when we do something too often or too long. It surfaces as tennis elbow, writer's cramp, and in a thousand other discomforts. The normal treatment is to wait for it to go away. Since it was invented as a disease about six years ago, it has spread like a bush fire through- out the whole spectrum of employment. The Federal Public Service alone paid A$24.13 million in compensation to suffer- ers last year. In the state of Victoria, it accounted for 62.4 per cent of all industrial disease claims last year from females. The federal government set up a RSI Task Force, then a RSI Implementation Group under a National Director of RSI Strategy. They reckon that it is costing 335 staff years a quarter, although the overall cost has been put at A$1 billion a year. Every- body is suing everybody else — settlements of up to AS200,000 have been reported and soon very little work will be done anywhere.
It started as a resistance to video display units, but has now spread to everything. Obviously, it is the disease England has been waiting for. The medical profession remains sceptical for the most part, saying there is no such disease: it is merely a fatigue syndrome. But nothing can stop it now. People have dubbed it 'Kangaroo's Paw' in reference to the fact that it seems confined to Australians. Another name suggested itself to me in conversation with Dr John Wilson, director of the Parafield Industrial Injury Clinic. After making a good joke about `RSIs are smiling', he complained about medical acronyms, pointing out that if you slept with a woman you caught Aids, if you slept alone you caught RSI. I prophesy a tremendous future for this wankers' disease in Britain, as soon as a few more people learn about it. It will go through the country like a dose of salts.
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